30 years after Challenger explosion McAuliffe's legacy endures

Saturday

FRAMINGHAM – When Christa Corrigan McAuliffe was a freshman at then-Framingham State College in the 1960s, she declared to her friends that someday she would go to space.

At the time, Mary Liscombe said her friend’s declaration was outlandish. Only highly trained former pilots could be astronauts then, Liscombe said, and those pilots were all men.

McAuliffe never did make it to space, but she came close. On Jan. 28, 1986, McAuliffe took off in the space shuttle Challenger, set to be the first teacher in space. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight, killing the entire seven-member crew.

This year, on the 30th anniversary of the doomed flight, Framingham State University and the Christa McAuliffe Center for Integrated Science Learning will host a special event to commemorate the disaster and honor the legacy of those astronauts. Irene Porro, director of the McAuliffe Center, which runs the Challenger Learning Center, said that legacy is to encourage quality learning here on Earth, and also in outer space.

McAuliffe, a Marian High School and Framingham State graduate, was chosen to be the first teacher in space in 1985, while she was teaching social studies at Concord High School in New Hampshire. As a teacher, Liscombe, the former McAuliffe Center director, said McAuliffe stressed the impact that ordinary people had on history.

“She was a firm believer that people learned about history best by reading the journals of the common people,” Liscombe said. “She thought there was a deeper level of learning by just learning what people did in their everyday lives.”

In space, McAuliffe planned to keep a journal.

Though the journal never was, Porro said McAuliffe opened doors for ordinary people in space history.

“I think, very much thanks to Christa, overall everyone really understood how this mission was something that would send everyone on a different path,” Porro said. “An ordinary person, a teacher, could be in space, really with the purpose to promote quality learning and education for all.”

Had McAuliffe successfully completed the space flight, the government was planning to then send a journalist, an artist, and other civilians to space, but the country's space program was grounded for more than two years after the disaster.

Porro said McAuliffe’s story was the vision of the space program to begin with: to make space travel routine and accessible. NASA carved out that mission, Porro said, because human nature is to conquer the next frontier. Though public efforts to get civilians up in space haven’t continued, private ones have. Soon, Porro said, space flight will be something accessible to common citizens, evidenced by the steady creeping toward the cosmos that people have made since the Challenger disaster.

Civilians have entered orbit. Some have paid their way up through Russian space programs, doling out millions to see the stars from space. The private Mars One expedition hopes to send people to live on the red planet in 2026. SpaceX is a private company established in 2002 with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets, according to its website. Virgin Galactic is the "world's first commercial space flight."

As citizens make those moves, Porro said it’s important to ask why.

“We should be able to go, and we should equip ourselves to go, and discuss why and who and how,” Porro said.

Liscombe said McAuliffe felt the "why" was opening the doors to opportunity.

“I’ve heard Grace (Corrigan, Christa’s mother) say to kids a million times when she’s talking to groups, ‘she did this for you, (Christa) did this for you students. She did this so you would be able to think of good things to do in your life, great things to do in your life,’” Liscombe said. “She planned on coming back and going back to the classroom and sharing her experience with students.”

Sharing that experience would have been much different, Liscombe said, than having a trained career astronaut come to speak to a class.

“If you go back to what Christa was thinking, an ordinary person going into space as a passenger is going to look at that whole experience in a different light than a person who is (an astronaut),” Liscombe said. “It’s like getting in an airplane. People who fly the airplane, work on the airplane, they look at the flight a lot differently than a passenger would.”

Porro said ordinary citizens would also have the chance to experience something only the elite typically do, something that might change the world perspective.

“Reflecting on some of the comments I hear from astronauts, they believe there will be an opportunity to bring people together,” Porro said. “The experience astronauts go through when they are in space and see Earth, they don’t see countries and boundaries.”

Author Frank White, of Natick, coined the term the "overview effect" to describe that experience. After hearing from many astronauts the overwhelming feeling of peace and humanity that they experience when seeing Earth from space, White found a common theme.

In his book, “The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution,” White asserts society might be more harmonious if people could see the Earth as one unit, rather than segmented into countries.

“It is really a documented shift in world view that people have. It’s the kind of change that’s beneficial,” White said of the effect. “In talking to astronauts, there’s an immediate understanding of interconnectedness between everything on Earth. It seems to bring out … a greater concern for humanity as a whole.”

White called the Challenger disaster a missed opportunity, one that would have opened space travel up to common citizens, which he said was the original hope of the space program. Though the Challenger, and McAuliffe, didn’t make it, White said the idea and the dream still did.

“This idea that we need to go beyond a professional astronaut core, which this seed was planted by Christa and her willingness to do this and take this risk, it’s grown,” White said. “That vision of possibility is still very much alive.”

It’s alive, White said, and likely not far off. If Mars One succeeds and humans colonize the planet, White said a central question is whether that society would be a more peaceful one than here on Earth.

“For those of us involved in the idea of space exploration, I think the underlying hope is humanity will evolve new and better societies as we move out into the solar system,” White said. “I don’t think it's guaranteed. I think it’s a choice.”

As people consider that choice, Porro said McAuliffe’s legacy will be honored through carrying out her dream. Liscombe said that dream is one that McAuliffe would hope the Challenger tragedy would not kill.

“This wouldn’t have stopped her. If this had happened to someone else … she would still want to do it, I’m pretty sure,” Liscombe said. “She had this in her mind for a very long time.”

Because McAuliffe would have continued her dream in the face of tragedy, Liscombe said society should, too.

“All we can do, I think this is what Christa was doing, is just reach for those stars and think beyond. You can’t accomplish something if you didn’t dream about it, think about it, plan it and work toward making it happen,” Liscombe said. “People are dreaming about this and they are working toward it so it could happen faster than any of us think.”

Brittney McNamara can be reached at 508-490-7463 or by email at bmcnamara@wickedlocal.com. Follow her on Twitter at @bmcnamara_MW.

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